Scientist Flannery looks at solutions to global warming

Doctor Tim Flannery is arguably Australia's best-known popular scientist, and his new book takes a look at the debate on global warming and the possible solutions.

Transcript

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TONY JONES: Well Dr Tim Flannery is arguably Australia's best known popular scientist. His new book, The Weather Makers, takes a look at the debate on global warming and possible solutions. Thanks for joining us, Tim Flannery.

DR TIM FLANNERY: It's a pleasure.

TONY JONES: Now, with America still reeling from these hurricanes, Rita and Katrina, to what extent do you believe these extreme events could be linked to global warming?

DR TIM FLANNERY: Look, I think that there is a clear link. But to focus on individual hurricanes is not a good way to try to understand what's happening. You're better off looking at, say, the total energy released by hurricanes over a season, and how much of that energy is being released in very intense systems like Rita, that we've just seen. And if you look at it that way, what you see is that over the last 20 years there's been a marked increase in the total amount of energy that's been released. And much of that energy is being released in very, very large storms. Those trends, clearly you can tie them very easily to climate change. But asking me about an individual cyclone, very hard.

TONY JONES: It is ironic though, isn't it, because in fact there are fewer storms but the ones you're getting appear to be much more intense. In America there's a big debate over whether that is cyclical, a weather event caused by natural things or whether it's in fact due to global warming. You don't seem to have any doubt. Why?

DR TIM FLANNERY: Um, look, there is a thing...if you look at North America alone, there are a number of factors that influence the cyclicity of storms. And, on a probably a 10 or 20 year cycle, there's been variability in the number of cyclones. That's driven by changes in the Atlantic ocean. But what we're seeing an overlay on top of that, and that overlay is these very hot waters that we're now getting in the Gulf of Mexico, up to 30 degrees Celsius, too warm to be comfortable to swim in, and a speeding up of the Gulf Stream, again that's related to climate change. So those two factors, I think pretty much without doubt are contributing to this increased energy budget for the big cyclones.

TONY JONES: Okay, but how you know, how do scientists know, that those things are related to climate change and not variable patterns in weather over time?

DR TIM FLANNERY: Well, I suppose if you take it back to first principles and say the heat being trapped around the planet has to go somewhere, it's going into the oceans, making hotter water, and the single most important factor when you look at these big cyclones is the surface temperature of the sea. The hotter the surface temperature of the sea, the more evaporation and more latent energy that goes into the atmosphere, and the more powerful these great heat engines can actually become.

TONY JONES: And more extreme weather events as a result?

DR TIM FLANNERY: That's right. And we're seeing more extreme weather events right across the spectrum, from droughts, to storms, hurricanes, heatwaves, the whole thing. And again, just a warmer atmosphere is a more energetic atmosphere, and all of these things will be enhanced in terms of their impact.

TONY JONES: Now, you actually foresee a time when insurance companies are going to take the bit between their teeth, probably in the United States, and begin arguing that there is no such thing any more, with these major weather events, as an act of God, and start thinking about who else is responsible?

DR TIM FLANNERY: I think so. I mean, when you look at it, an act of God in a legal sense is something that no reasonable man could have anticipated. Now with climate change science, and the projections that are being made now and our increased understanding of the atmosphere and the impacts of these greenhouse gasses on it, reasonable men can anticipate what will happen.

TONY JONES: What would the case look like? If someone made a case like that it would end up being one of the cases like whether tobacco causes harm or something of that nature. Is anyone gearing up to make that kind of case in the United States?

DR TIM FLANNERY: I think people are gearing up. There's some cases where States are taking the Federal Government to court in the US over whether greenhouse gases should be classed as pollutants or not. But you can imagine how it'd start, it might be the industry groups that are so successfully lobbied, for example, to prevent the Rio Earth Summit from taking firm action on this. The success of those groups, we can measure in terms of gigatonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere and degrees of temperature rise. So, there you've got an interesting link that I think lawyers will be looking at more, with greater interest, I should say, in future.

TONY JONES: Alright, now you end your book talking about Paul Crutzen, who actually won the Nobel Prize for his work on, as you put it, saving the world from CFCs and preventing the hole in the ozone layer from becoming terminal. More recently he has turned his attention to saving the world from global warming, as he sees it. He's talking about a potential future which you call a carbon dictatorship. What do you mean by that?

DR TIM FLANNERY: What I mean by that is that perhaps the situation will get so dire that the world will need to cooperate in a very...integrated way to stabilise the global climate. And that may involve restrictions on emissions from all sorts of sources - agriculture, mining, industry and whatever else, and once you get to that point, you get a government that reaches very, very deep down into the lives of individual human beings. And I think that's a very undesirable outcome. Far better to let Gaia, or let natural systems control the climate. If we get into a carbon dictatorship situation, we will have a truly dreadful dictatorship. We're carbon-based life. Carbon is everywhere, it's integral to the way the planet works. So you don't want to let things go on so long that you're forced into that rather terrible situation.

TONY JONES: Well, it's even hard to imagine it, I mean, what you're talking about smacks of world government. I mean, the United States, for example, is moving away from its agreements with the United Nations for precisely that reason, that it's horrified by the notion of world government and not to mention the power of the carbon lobbies, the fossil fuel lobbies at least in the United States?

DR TIM FLANNERY: That's true. And you could argue that history's moving away in the short term from that sort of solution. But just imagine we do nothing for 50 years and we get to a point where the globe's climate is rapidly destabilising and we need then to act in unison to prevent more of the greenhouse gases getting into the atmosphere and to sequester the carbon that's already there, to pull it out. You would have to use, I guess, every aspect of human enterprise to do that. We'd have to change global agriculture, make it more sustainable. You'd have to change the way industries works. Ultimately someone would come up with the idea probably that, well, you know, maybe the problem is 10 billion people on the planet. Maybe we're focusing on the wrong end of things, maybe we should just, you know, focus on population. At that point you'd have a global dictatorship in the bedrooms of people around the planet and that would be a very undesirable thing.

TONY JONES: What is forecast here is something known as the earth commission for thermostatic control. Is that Crutzen's idea or yours?

DR TIM FLANNERY: That's my idea. Crutzen was the one who foresaw the need for this. He saw that we'd have to undertake what we calls large-scale planetary engineering, so alter the carbon cycle of planet Earth.

TONY JONES: You can't even get Washington and Australia to sign up to the Kyoto agreement. I mean, how could you imagine a situation where America, for example, would put itself in the hands of a world government - regulating its agriculture, for example, regulating land use and all of those things?

DR TIM FLANNERY: I think it will happen by degrees. Probably you'll have some mechanisms set up and as the situation deteriorates not being effectively addressed. You can imagine that, you know, the first thing might be something that even resembles Kyoto and then goes on. When you ask yourself about Kyoto, just think - what would happen if some members reneged on the deal. Just say America and Australia did join and a smaller country decided to renege. How would the Kyoto mechanism deal with that sort of situation?

TONY JONES: In a situation of major crisis, you mean in the future?

DR TIM FLANNERY: That's right.

TONY JONES: The problem is if we only move to these things by degrees, you have to have the steps along the way. When you have the power of the oil and coal corporations in the United States, where, for example, only 10 years ago, Fred Palmer, the CEO of Western Fuels, put out a very influential film called 'The Greening of the Planet', which argued, in fact, that we don't have enough carbon dioxide in the world.

DR TIM FLANNERY: That's right. It was extraordinary. He wanted to play a role in bringing CO2 up to 1,000 parts per million, which is unbelievably high, three times the present levels. He saw that as being a good thing. He said we'd have another green revolution, crops would grow ever better and life would be so much better. The work has been done now to show that was just a fantasy, but such a dangerous fantasy. It's a pit like the other great fantasy of the '60s of blowing up the polar ice caps with nuclear weapons so we could alter the climate of the planet.

TONY JONES: This is only 15 years ago, and this man had tremendous amount of power then and still does, I think, in the United States, as a lobbyist.

DR TIM FLANNERY: That's true. And I think that's very dangerous. Look, and to be fair to Mr Palmer perhaps those ideas now have passed their use-by date, I'm not sure they're still current. But they had a big impact on thinking around the time of the Rio earth summit. The reason we didn't get more resolute action on this very urgent matter then was that sort of thinking.

TONY JONES: Do you think the major worldwide debate among scientists as to whether or not global warming exists or doesn't exist has been ended effectively by George W. Bush himself saying there is such a thing as man-made global warming?

DR TIM FLANNERY: I think that's correct, yeah. The G8 summit at Gleneagles this year, when that statement was agreed to, was a fundamental tipping point, really, for the politics of dealing with climate change. Because George Bush is arguably the leader of the developed world, and for him to say, yes, climate change is real, it's a problem, and humans are causing that problem, is an admission to a very, very large problem.

TONY JONES: Let's move on to what can be done about it, what potential solutions there are, because both in Australia and the United States, the main game is about carbon sequestration, which effectively means pumping it underground from coal-fired power stations. Is it feasible to do that in your opinion?

DR TIM FLANNERY: It's technically feasible. Whether you can make electricity cost effective in doing it is another matter. What you have to do is somehow collect this CO2 and you've got to design a new sort of power plant to allow that to happen. And when you burn a ton of coal, you don't just get a ton of CO2, you get 3.7 tons of CO2 because those little carbon atoms combine with larger oxygen atoms to make this big waste stream. You have to capture the stuff, then compress it, and to compress the CO2, so you can put it into the ground takes about 20 per cent of the energy you got from burning the coal in the first place. Then you have to put it in the ground and hope it will stay there forever. So there are some challenges.

TONY JONES: Are there enough holes, enough places where you can put it and are they anywhere near coal fired power stations or do you have to build a new generation of power stations next to the holes, as it were?

DR TIM FLANNERY: Yeah, well, you have to transport either the coal or the CO2 in many cases because the holes don't exist next to the power plants. And that is one issue. In some places they do happen to be close together. But the big problem with this really to my way of thinking is that the technologies are so new and unproven, even the International Energy Agency says they will not be contributing more than about 10 per cent of global energy by 2050. We will be out of are carbon budget by 2040 at current rates of use.

TONY JONES: Yet governments, the Australian Government, the American government, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on helping develop these technologies. I raise that because there is one wildcard in Australia at least that you talk about near end of your book and that's the extraordinary geothermal power, what they call hot rocks. Can you tell us about what's going on in South Australia?

DR TIM FLANNERY: That has been the most extraordinary discovery, I think, of my time in this field. What we've seen is 4km down South Australian desert, there are rocks that have water in them, which is heated to 250 degrees Celsius. It's 5,000 psi pressure. And people have now drilled down into that layer, and have found that you can use this superheated water to generate electricity. And that is - it's such a massive reserve. There's enough power down there or potential power to power Australia for about three quarters of a century. If that technology works out, we won't have to worry about burning too much coal in decades to come.

TONY JONES: How would you make it work, how would you convert hot rocks into electricity, how do you that and how do you then get the electricity from where it is underground, where the power is underground or the energy, through to the major cities in Australia, if it indeed would power the entire country?

DR TIM FLANNERY: Well, look, getting the steam out of the ground is not so difficult. Comes up of its own volition. Sounds like a jet engine when you see the steam pouring out of it. Then you have a heat exchanger at the top that exchange the heat very efficiently and allows it to turn a turbine, so you can generate your electricity. And I must say this is not yet built, this is what's projected to be built. Olympic dam is fairly close. They have huge energy needs, 400 megawatt energy needs there. There's another 400-megawatt line running down to Adelaide, so you'd get 800 megawatts of power through that. If there are any aluminium smelters around the place, they would be sensible to look at relocating around that area because it will be relatively cheap power, about the same price as energy derived from brown coal. So there's a number of ways you could move things in and out of the region.

TONY JONES: Very briefly - it's an extraordinary development, obviously, and we haven't had a chance to talk about a whole range of alternatives which we should have and will another time. But the Government has put an awful lot of money into pumping carbon dioxide underground. Should it have been investing its money in other directions like this?

DR TIM FLANNERY: I think we have to cover the whole basket. We have to look across the spectrum of possibilities here. Governments are bad at picking winners on these things, I think, by and large. So it'd be good to see investment across the spectrum. I do think that looking at the new coal-burning technologies is worth doing, but we have to realise that will not come on line until the world is out of carbon budget. What I mean by that is we'll be past the dangerous threshold of climate change before these new coal-burning technologies can significantly input. So demand management, hugely important, greater efficiencies, the standard old energy generation we've had renewables like wind and solar thermal - all will be very important parts our energy future. The good news is Australia is just so rich in those.

TONY JONES: We have only just touched the tip of the melting iceberg. We'll speak to you about the rest of these things another time. Thanks very much for joining us.